Remember when Ferriss published The 4-Hour Workweek? The whole book felt like a magic pill. And millions of people rushed off to hire virtual assistants in the Philippines.
Virtual assistants in the Philippines... It's genuinely hard to believe that was a real thing that happened in our universe.
But that's not my point. Honestly, I'm exhausted by success recipes. "5 steps to product-market fit." "7 conversion techniques." I have 200 bookmarks, 47 videos in my Watch Later queue, and a Telegram channel full of "useful stuff." Never opened any of it. Sound familiar?
The problem isn't the techniques. The problem is that we tend to copy things without understanding why they work or what context they belong to. Repeating a tactic without grasping the underlying principle is basically following a YouTube workout with the sound off. Looks similar. Doesn't work.
Here's what got me thinking about this. Elena Verna from Lovable recently published a post on five retention techniques. Each one seemingly works. Each one drove growth. But that's not the most valuable part. The real gold was two principles about retention metrics at the end.
First: retention tests take time. If you're thinking about improvements, be genuinely prepared to isolate your control group for a long stretch – and be ready to wait. Which is much harder than it sounds.
Second: retention is counterintuitive. To keep people long-term, you have to deliver real value – there's no other way. And that very often means playing against yourself in the short term: free credits, product bundles, cheap lite plans for churned users, and so on. Counterintuitive, but that's what actually works.
So. To hell with how-to lists – give me principles.
Tactics are dead weight in a folder called "deal with later." Principles are the things you write down because you feel it immediately: this is worth sitting with.
When I come across another list of tactics, I scan it for the principle. No principle – I close it. There is one – I capture only that.
How many "Best ways to..." lists have you saved in the last month? And how many have you actually used?
Want to get all my top Linkedin content? I regularly upload it to one Notion doc.
Go here to download it for FREE
